The game is for better or worse the most direct sequel possible to Duke Nukem 3D in concept, and in execution. Also it’s a PC game. I know it’s been ported to console, but really half of the problems that are plaguing these reviews populating sites like Metacritic and the like, would be eliminated if they played the superior PC build. Which sort of makes sense considering that 90 percent of the game’s original audience was cultivated on the PC. There’s stupid things that keep it from being just like the old days, like the two weapon limit, and Duke’s missing abilities, and inventory, but the rest is there in some way shape or form. So in a very long winded way I’m saying I liked it. And though it was a disappointment, it seems like it’s a lot cooler to say you hated it, instead of being someone like me and admitting the opposite. Ah well. I never did like the cool kids.

It’s disappointing that Gearbox couldn’t quite make the whole experience a worthwhile effort for someone like Duke, while, by the same token, it sticks to its retro guns fittingly in some parts, enough to make the game worth a rental. It’s nothing that’ll make you scream “Hail to the king!” but it’s sufficient, mindless entertainment. That is, if you can sink down to the level where it’s sitting. For crying out loud. At one point, you’re controlling Duke while he takes a piss. Take that gaming experience as you will.

Duke Nukem Forever has had a long and checkered history but it has finally arrived. Is it worth your $60? It all depends on your outlook. Duke Nukem Forever has been positioned as a AAA title. Unfortunately for Duke he just doesn’t have the same amount of polish we’ve seen in other first person shooters on the platform. The promise of a fully interactive world isn’t fully realized and the small physics puzzles that are present are simple and straight forward. If you can get passed the muddy graphics, dated character design, difficult first person platforming and throwaway multiplayer there is an enjoyable single player campaign to be had.

It was ambitious for Gearbox Studios to try and pick up the slack of 3D Realms vaporware, and while I’m sure it will pan out of them financially, the sheer lack of effort and polish on DNF has put serious doubts in my mind as to whether or not I’m going to be picking up Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded -- Gearbox’s modern re-release of the classic Duke Nukem 3D. Of course, with no release date in sight, I might be well into my 40s by the time it comes out.

I leave the poor sucker there in the past, baffled, bewildered and with no knowledge of the future of gaming, or of Duke Nukem Forever aside from the meagre details he'll remember from that copy of PC Gamer from 1997. It's probably better that way. In fact it would've been better that way for everyone.

It fizzes with ideas that once upon a time would have been novel - perhaps breathtaking - but poor implementation and the passage of time simply make them feel staid and worn-out. This is a game that should be sitting on the same shelf as Half-Life and Doom 3, not Bulletstorm and latter-day Call of Duty, and unfortunately these are the modern yardsticks it must be judged by.

Duke Nukem is an icon of mid-1990s video game culture – brash, vulgar and committed to the art of the one-liner, like a twelve-year old boy with internet access. His association with Duke Nukem Forever's extended development cycle has propelled him to legendary status, attaching to him an undeserved significance. Duke Nukem Forever isn't a revitalization of the early days of the first-person shooter genre or a middle-finger to the increasingly complex and sophisticated nature of videogame entertainment. It's a muddled, hypocritical exercise in irritation with solid shooting mechanics and decent encounter design. There's some dumb fun to be had in Duke Nukem Forever, but the game tries hard to ensure it's only fleeting.

In many ways, Duke Nukem 3D presaged how shooters would eventually evolve, which goes a long to way toward explaining why people are even paying attention right now. Forever has strip-mined this legacy, and has little to show for it. It's an embarrassing, abhorrent heir resting on its laurels with plenty of ugly humor, bubblegum pastiche, and very little in the way of ass-kicking prowess.

And that, as insane as it sounds, is the crux of the matter: Duke Nukem Forever feels like it was rushed out the door. So many of the design decisions are poor, so much of the maps are unbalanced (going from uneventful to extremely difficult in a flash), and the graphics are so shoddy, that an experienced gamer can come to no other conclusion. You may like the humor or you may want to write your Congressman about it -- ultimately, that's a matter for you and your conscience -- but one way or another, you can't deny that this game just isn't very much fun.

Alas, what many had hoped would be a glorious trip down memory lane, is a muddled affair that lacks spit and polish across the board. Hail to the king, baby? No. Sadly, it’s more akin to, ‘Fail to the king, baby.’ And I’m genuinely disappointed that I couldn’t love the game more. In a weird way, I hope that Duke Nukem Forever makes enough money for us to see another game in the franchise—one that doesn’t take 14 years to produce—so that we can have a Duke Nukem experience with gameplay that takes genre advances into account and not one that relies too heavily on us wearing old-school-gaming goggles to appreciate a game that is desperately outdated.

We all wanted this game to be good, and perhaps that sense of expectation has proven to be too much. But even then you can look at the shabby graphics, woeful humour and dull gameplay and realise that this game would have been underwhelming whenever it was released. A real shame.

All in all, Duke Nukem Forever is out, which can be seen as an achievement in itself. However, all that development time has not produced the game it should be. DNF feels unfinished, unexciting and not what die hard fans deserved. All we can do is look to the future now, the monkey (so to speak) is off of Gearbox’s back, so lets see what they can REALLY do with the series.

You might notice that I don’t list Duke Nukem Forever‘s brazen lack of morals or political correctness as a fault. This is because I wasn’t offended by any of it. If you know anything at all about Duke’s previous adventures, you have to expect a certain amount of objectionable material; it’s par for Duke’s course. Besides, there’s more than enough wrong with this game to push all of that to the back burner. I liked the variety in the mission designs, and Duke’s one-liners never cease to raise a chuckle or two with me, but the graphics glitches and criminally long load times ruin what is at times an entertaining shooter. But I suggest that you play it despite its flaws, if only for the chance to be part of gaming history—you can look other gamers in the eye and truthfully say that you played Duke Nukem Forever. After 15 years, that has to be worth something, right?

Duke Nukem Forever is a deeply flawed game that I would have stopped playing after five minutes were it not a requirement of my job to play longer. Although no amount of money could have convinced me to press on all the way to the end.

Except for one or two moments -- the shrunken Duke sections are enjoyable -- Duke Nukem Forever isn't interesting; in fact, it's boring. The gunplay is wrote, the weapons are holdovers from 1996, and the levels aren't interesting or open enough to validate any kind of exploration.

Overall, the game feels rushed and thrown together if you can believe it. The game will stutter without cause, damage models are essentially devoid of any type of realism, and online lag will make you yearn for a different multiplayer experience.

There are few things worth waiting this long for, and so far in the gaming industry, I don't know if we've had even one. This is the Chinese Democracy of our industry: When it finally does see the light of day, everybody mocks it anyway and nobody really cares. But hey, if you haven't played a shooter in a decade and want to slap around some alien boobs, you'll be right at home. For the rest of us, unless you need a game from the past and don't want to dig up your time capsule to play something, this is best left to the vaporware we all thought it was for so long. At least it was legendary then, when we didn't actually know what to expect.

Duke isn’t entirely unplayable and, sometimes, it even gets to the action you picked up the game looking for. If it positioned itself as a $20 game, peer to bargain bin or XBLA titles, I’d give it a much higher score. However, it did not. Even though you can pick up the game for less than $10 now, it was $60 when it was first released. This puts it in a league with all the other full-priced games that came out last year (Portal 2, Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City, to name a few) and, as such, these are the games it has to be compared to. This comparison does nothing to flatter the game.

It’s a real shame to say this, but Duke Nukem Forever is a terrible game. The weight of expectation was too much for this game to bare. It lacks originality and polish throughout, with terrible platforming elements, a distinctive lack in shooting combat (I thought this was a FPS?) and a multiplayer component that is just too bad for words. After over a decade in development it’s safe to say that Duke Nukem Forever would have been better off remaining as vaporware. The character of Duke Nukem is all but dead after this tiresome, frustrating and ugly affair.

Given its storied development history, you might be inclined to grab a copy of this train wreck. Avoid the temptation. While much of Duke Nukem Forever is embarrassingly bad--the kind of game you point and laugh at--its biggest problem is that it's so tedious. Twisting valves, jumping on pipes and alien tentacles, driving through drab canyons, rolling alien spheres along the ground: this is what Duke Nukem Forever is about. It's not about shooting aliens, and it certainly isn't about fun. This game takes an icon and turns him into a laughingstock. Except, no one's laughing.

While once a respectable gaming legend, Duke is nothing more than an embarrassment now. The game is so behind the times that it’s shameful. It pokes fun at titles that it tries to be and titles that are far better than it. It’s so dull and straightforward that there is just little to no fun. For a game that’s so keen on humor, there’s definitely a big joke here, I just can’t tell whether it’s some kind of self parody, or if the joke is on us?